Aging & Wisdom Quote by Catherine Crowe

Crowe is taking a scalpel to the social machinery that turns ignorance into certainty: authority. The sentence is long, stacked, and deliberately cumulative, mimicking the way official opinion piles on weight until dissent feels not just wrong but laughable. Her target isn’t a single bad prediction; it’s the reflex by which “the highest authorities” declare the limits of reality, then confuse that declaration with reality itself.

The key move is her pairing of “untrue and absurd, and even impossible.” She escalates the charge the way gatekeepers do: first you’re mistaken, then you’re ridiculous, then you’re violating nature. Crowe’s subtext is that power doesn’t merely arbitrate facts; it polices imagination. By the time an idea is branded “impossible,” the crowd has been trained to treat curiosity as a character flaw.

Then she twists the knife with timing: “within a very short period.” That clause shrinks the comfortable defense that experts were simply products of their time. She’s reminding readers how quickly consensus can flip, how flimsy the prestige of certainty is when it rests on habit and institutional self-protection rather than evidence. It’s a warning shot at credentialed complacency, but also an invitation to humility: if yesterday’s “impossible” can become today’s ordinary, the sensible posture is skepticism toward pronouncements that sound final.

In Crowe’s nineteenth-century world of rapid scientific change and fierce moral gatekeeping, that argument lands as both intellectual and political. She’s not romanticizing contrarianism; she’s insisting that history keeps exposing the same pattern: the loudest “no” often marks the boundary of someone’s authority, not the boundary of truth.